“Silken Dalliance”: Fashion and Rhetoric in Byron’s Dramas and the Letter to Murray

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay traces Byron’s inconsistent efforts to reinstate the civilizing “laws” of literature in the realm of English letters. Straddling the antique and the Romantic, Byron rebelled against Wordsworth by resorting to older models of social and literary decorum, which he identified as the “dress” that made language and society legible. While Wordsworth renounced the classical analogy of language as the “dress” of thought, Byron attempted to distinguish between rooted customary dress and arbitrary modern fashion as models for literary language. However the distinction between the figures that form the world into an orderly kosmos, or harmonious arrangement, and those that throw it into chaos crumbles under the pressure of Byron’s philosophy that the universe is caught in a cycle of destruction and re-creation. By reading the Letter to Murray alongside three of Byron’s dramas—Cain, The Deformed Transformed, and Sardanapalus—this essay maps how Byron’s polarizing view of history informed a poetics in which chaos and kosmos are locked in perpetual struggle. Furthermore, it argues that in Sardanapalus Byron brings the material conditions of life at the turn of the nineteenth century to bear on the long-standing polarity between chaos and kosmos in debates about poetic language.